Rock 'n' Roll 'n' Blues Women!

Who: Twenty-eight-year-old Londoner whose self-titled debut has garnered huge raves in the UK. Calvi has drawn comparisons to PJ Harvey, with whom Calvi shares a producer (Rob Ellis) and a taste for torchy romanticism. But her songs – languorous ballads with reverb-heavy guitar atmospherics and bursts of clattering rock & roll – have a style, and a strangeness, all their own.

Early Start/Late Start: Calvi began taking violin lessons at age six and started teaching herself guitar two years later. "I got really into Jimi Hendrix," she says. "I used to listen to his records and try to play along." She developed into a skilled player – but shied away from singing until recently. "I knew I wanted to make my own music, but I had to get over my fear of singing. So about five years ago, I locked myself away and practiced singing for six hours a day." On Anna Calvi, her voice moves from hushed and confessional to a full-throated lioness's roar, calling to mind singers such as Nico and, yes, Polly Harvey. But Calvi's vocal heroines are divas of an older vintage. "I love Maria Callas and Edith Piaf," she says.
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To anyone familiar with Anna Calvi, it would come as little surprise to discover that there was a time when the 28-year-old singer-songwriter was considering going to art school, such is the ferocity of her vision and the eerie and sophisticated aesthetic that she has carefully constructed. In the end, though, music won out as the overriding passion. After all, Calvi was just four years old when she first asked her parents for a violin. There was something about the small, stringed instrument that fascinated the precocious young Londoner. By eight she was teaching herself to play the guitar that her father had left lying around the house and, at nine, Calvi became a fully-fledged songwriter, composing a tune imagining that she was in David Bowie's band. MORE

Tom Tom Magazine: What is your favorite percussion set-up? Why?

Erica Garcia: I’m not a real percussionist, I’m a multi-instrumentalist. My friends asked me to play percussion, so I pretty much play whatever they put it in front of me- but I don’t necessarily know the name of the things I’m playing. I definitely don’t like those things that make rain sounds, or the curtain chimes, or however you call it.

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